


In defense of first-person fiction (fannish and not)

by breathedout



Series: Meta Essays [5]
Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived from havingbeenbreathedout blog, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 19:56:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16839343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: A series of posts/conversations on why the use of the first person voice is so maligned in the fannish world.The original post, which was a response to a thread started by @fierce-awakening, was originally published on June 28, 2017. Subsequent chapters are replies to replies.





	1. Original post

> **fierceawakening said** : I will never understand this weird thing where fandom decided first person is evil. [...] first person POV is just about how close one is to the action and what one gets to see and not see.  
>    
>  Like, if the POV is broader, then you get to see things that don’t happen to the protagonist. So you may go from a scene where she’s frightened and going “gulp me save the world ahaha ha nope” to a scene set in the castle of the Evil Overlady, and catch a glimpse of her plans.  
>    
>  If the POV is narrower, EVEN IF THE WORK IS WRITTEN IN THIRD PERSON, you don’t get to see what Overlady’s up to except insofar as she crosses paths with Scaredtagonist.  
>    
>  First person POV is even narrower, but honestly it’s not that much narrower than tight third person. If you’re writing tight third person sooner or later your editor is going to go “scaredtagonist couldn’t have seen this” and you’re going to go “shit you right” and burn your house down in frustration ANYWAY because THESE EDITS ARE DUE WHEN  
>    
>  so why is a pronoun a big deal?

I would go further [than fierceawakening's comments]: I think there are some opportunities that first-person gives a writer, that even very close third-person does not.

The first is a much greater ability to play with unreliable narration. A writer working in third-person can still, of course, portray characters who lack self-awareness, or are lying to themselves or other people. But with first-person narration you have the potential to disguise a character’s intentional (and unintentional, but particularly intentional) lying from the reader to a much greater degree. In Ian McEwan’s _Atonement_ , for example, the first-person coda at the end of the book brilliantly and heartbreakingly reveals the entire 300+ pages of third-person narration that precedes it, to be a deliberate, self-serving construction. I can’t think of a way of doing this without giving elderly Briony her own voice. Similarly, in _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_ , Agatha Christie plays with the reader’s implicit trust in the mystery-novel convention of the detective’s sidekick/recorder, whose narration is presumed to be—but turns out not to be—trustworthy. A movie like _Memento_ works by the same principle: we are so deep in the POV of the main character, experiencing time in a similarly fragmented and unexplained way to the way he experiences it, that the film is able to trick us into sharing many of his mistaken conclusions, and only as we travel back in time do we realize the extent to which he’s made the decision to be an unreliable narrator to his own future self. (Creepy! And very effective.)

The second is that it can more closely mirror the tone and style of specific eras, genres, and canons. It would be SUPER difficult, for example, to write a hard-boiled noir novel narrated in third person. The jaded voiceover of the wisecracking private eye is such a genre convention that it just wouldn’t feel the same without it. Fanfic-wise, within a particular canon the first-person voice can also be very distinctive. When I wrote a _Heathers_ fanfic, I couldn’t really imagine telling it any way but in first-person, even though my narrator changed from Veronica Sawyer (whose diary entries, in voiceover, narrate the film) to her frenemy Heather Chandler. The stylized 80s teen speak is such a defining characteristic of that film that it wouldn’t feel like Heathers without it; and that way of speaking is so obtrusive that it would feel very strange if it wasn’t coming out of the mouth of a specific character. Similarly, how would you write a _Jeeves & Wooster_ fanfic without taking on the first-person voice of either Jeeves or Wooster? A Wodehouse fanfic from the third person (or from the POV of, say, Aunt Agatha) would certainly be an intriguing challenge, but it just as certainly wouldn’t feel like an extension of the original books. 

Back in the realm of original fiction, sometimes a character has SUCH a vibrant, unique, living narrative voice that simply spending time with them carries the joy of reading. I’m thinking here of Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly in _The True History of the Kelly Gang_ ; Marilynne Robinson’s John Ames in _Gilead_ ; Harper Lee’s Scout in _To Kill a Mockingbird_ ; Kazuo Ishiguro’s Stevens in _The Remains of the Day_. All those narrators absolutely make the books they’re part of; those novels are unimaginable without their particular, unique methods of narration.

And let’s not forget that it can also be an incredibly meaningful political act, to allow a traditionally-silenced character to speak in their own voice. There’s a whole tradition of this, particularly in post-colonial and feminist literature: I’m thinking of Jean Rhys’s _Wide Sargasso Sea_ , in which Bertha Rochester gets to speak for herself rather than being relegated to the racialized madwoman in the attic of _Jane Eyre_ ; or Margaret Atwood’s _The Penelopiad_ , which grants Odysseus’s wife the ability to tell her own story; or, again, Peter Carey’s _The True History of the Kelly Gang_ , in which a despised child of convicts gets his own rich, voiced subjectivity. People of color/colonized people, women, and the criminalized poor are all groups that all too often are talked over; whose stories are co-opted by the dominant group in ways that end up being demonizing, condescending, and invisibilizing. Allowing these characters space to speak for themselves, in first person, challenges that tradition of oppression. 

The third advantage of first-person is that it provides the opportunity to have a specific, in-universe audience for the narrative, which in turn alters the way the narrating character(s) are telling their stories, and their motivation for doing so. In this way, the very fact of these characters choosing to narrate their stories, becomes a huge element of characterization. In _Gilead_ , for example, Reverend Ames in his old age is writing a letter to his very young son, so that his son will know where he comes from after his father dies. As such, the book is bittersweet, elegiac, tender; the quiet overflowing of a heart flush with love. By contrast, the narrators of Mariama Bâ’s _Une si longue lettre_ and Alice Walker’s _The Color Purple_ are both writing out of a sense of abandonment, of profound loneliness—Celie, in _The Color Purple_ , begins the novel so beat down and isolated that the only recipient she can imagine for her letters is God; whereas Ramatoulaye, in Bâ’s novel, is reaching out to a long-lost friend as part of her process of mourning her recently-deceased husband. Both Celie’s rage and desperation and Ramatoulaye’s lonely grief are part and parcel of the very act of narrating. Those emotions infuse every part of their narrations; they wouldn’t be narrating otherwise. 

This approach can be more multifaceted, too, and serve different aspects of the themes & narrative. Wilkie Collins’s _The Woman in White_ uses the conceit of building a legal case by collecting many first-person accounts from many different characters, all of whom have their own differing allegiances and their axes to grind, and all of whom witnessed different portions of the action. This adds a level of tension, because the reader is always wondering which of the narrators is reliable. It also adds a level of fun and narrative interest, because Collins captures the different voices and self-serving delusions of the characters so delightfully (with the exception of the male romantic lead, who’s a wet noodle). Siri Hustvedt’s _The Blazing World_ uses a similar many-first-person-accounts approach to tell the life story, after her death, of a complex and difficult female artist: each narrator speaks from their own unique love and hatred and confusion and woundedness and joy, and the results are, in my opinion, more gutting than any third-person account could have been, because of that foregrounding of individual subjectivity: the masks we wear, the impossibility of knowing another person completely; the intentional and unintentional legacies we leave behind. 

There are more rationales for using first-person, but these are the first that leap to mind for me, and I find them all compelling.


	2. Response to uweremythtaken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to a reply by uweremythtaken

> **uweremythtaken said:** i personally stay away from first-person fanfic because it tends to not be about character development and feels super awkward and uncomfortable when it gets to smut. but as far as good storytelling and character development goes, some of my favorites are first-person. the stranger, lolita, heart of darkness, how could they be what they are in anything but first person??

Totally agreed re: _The Stranger_ in particular. 

I’m interested in this division of fanfic & original fiction **(which seems pretty common so please don’t feel like I’m picking on you personally! I’m more riffing on this as a theme.)** But— again without commenting on the preferences of any particular individual—the general stated dislike in fandom circles for first-person fanfic seems at odds with the general actual behavior of fans when presented with fics written in the first person.

My frames of reference are a little out of date here because I stopped watching the show 2.5 seasons ago, but for example, in the BBC Sherlock fandom: Ivyblossom’s [The Progress of Sherlock Holmes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/173274/chapters/253157) and [The Quiet Man](https://archiveofourown.org/works/322978/chapters/520106) are both first-person, explicit-rated, and I feel safe in saying that they are both considered “fandom classics,” with 10K & 5K kudos respectively on AO3. MadLori’s [Alone on the Water](https://archiveofourown.org/works/210785), which as a Gen-rated first-person fic about major character death is kind of a juggernaut of “don’ts,” is likewise a fandom touchstone at 7K kudos and has been for as long as I’ve been around. (TPoSH & AotW are both in the first page of Sherlock BBC fics, sorted by kudos.) SilentAuror, sweetcupncakes, appliddell and verityburns have all have written first-person fics in that fandom with over 1,000 kudos. Slipping sideways into a different iteration of Holmesiana, one of my all-time favorite fics for the Ritchie movies is gyzym’s [History, Repeating Itself](https://archiveofourown.org/works/179622/chapters/264073), which at almost 1K kudos is the fourth-highest rated fic in the tag and is DELIGHTFULLY narrated in the first person. Ahahaha man, it’s really wonderful.

Nowhere near their levels of popularity but still kind of surprising relative to other things I’ve written: my own [most popular non-Sherlock story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021436) is an explicit-rated underage F/F/F one-shot in a small fandom, narrated in the first person, in which all three characters have the same first name: also kind of a juggernaut of don’ts. Many of the comments and bookmarks on that fic say things like “smut that somehow works as character study” and “this made me actually like the canonically horrid main character; how did you do this through smut??” I’m not saying the first-person narration is the only reason the characterization works in this story… but it is pretty central to how the characterization works in this story! I mean I never write sex that isn’t primarily a character study, so I can certainly do it in the third person too, but the urgency and anger of the story come from Heather Chandler’s very defensive, brittle, un-self-aware narration of her own experience. 

Of course there are always exceptions to any rule, but it seems strange to me that if in actuality 10% of the highest-ranked fic in a given fandom is first-person, there should simultaneously be such a prevalent negative or dismissive attitude, in the abstract, toward fanfic writers who use this POV. It certainly doesn’t seem to be scaring readers off uniformly, whether that’s just because they’re willing to take a risk for a bigger-name author they’re familiar with, or for some other reason.

Anyway. To each their own; I’m just bemused. I had a similar point of confusion, when I first got into fandom, around people claiming they never read AUs and then saying, like, “Oh except for Abundantlyqueer’s “Two Two One Bravo Baker,” of course… oh and MadLori’s “Performance in a Leading Role,” that one’s great… and everything Bendingsignpost ever wrote… but except for that I never read AUs” and I just felt like… that actually sounds like you read a fair few AUs, friend.


	3. Response to tyrannosaurus-trainwreck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A response to tyrannosaurus-trainwreck's reply to the first person thread.

> **tyrannosaurus-trainwreck said:**  
>   
>  I wonder if it’s just observer bias writ large?  
>   
> I mean, my own preference against the first-person POV in professional fiction is that it adds an extra hurdle to the narrative–if everything’s great or at least tolerable, and I can dig the work, an off-putting (or even unengaging) narrator can kick me back out of it pretty easily. So if I have a stack of novels in the third person and an equal stack of novels in the first person, there are going to be a fair number of novels whose problems I can sort of read around in the third-person stack that I probably won’t be able to in the first-person stack.  
>   
> I’ve also noticed that first-person can let writers, in they’re so inclined, be a bit lazier with character, too. I mean, all the luck to whoever saw it as a more difficult thing because it forced character development and depth, but the clunkier things I’ve noped out of with first-person novels have used it to just be like “and then I felt this emotion, because this, and that emotion, because that,” which felt more like a grocery list than fiction. Obviously not a problem with literature that’s already passed a sort of threshold by dint of the longevity of its popularity or the persistence of its critical acclaim or what have you, but there’s always Sturgeon’s Law lurking around in the background for things whose only vetting has been “an editor or two thought this could make a buck.”  
>   
> So obviously, this is not a problem inherent in first-person fiction, but problems that I have noticed cropping up in first-person fiction, which makes me more likely to have the reaction of side-eyeing a novel written in the first person unless it comes strongly recommended or appears to be doing something interesting and unique with the voice.  
>   
> When it comes to fic, the issue’s probably more pronounced the way it almost always is with fic–amateur authors developing skills and experimenting, often working with editors and critics who are also developing their skills–but now it’s also being commented on by an audience that’s sorting through so much dross looking for their own personal flecks of gold like trigger-happy parental-control software.

Yeah. This is helpful, I think. 

Reflecting on this response, and on a subsequent conversation about the subject with Gins, I realized a relevant thing about my own reading, both fanfic and original fiction (and other leisure reading, for that matter), which is that at this point in my life I basically never read _anything_ that hasn’t been strongly recommended to me by a source I trust. I never go into an AO3 tag clicking on fics I’ve never heard of. The ones on my to-be-read list are always either by an author I already like and/or know personally, or have been recced to me by Gins (this is probably 75% of all the fanfic I have ever read), or have been recced by another mutual on Tumblr, often specifically to me. And I can’t even find the time to read all the fics in these categories! I currently have twelve of them open in tabs, some of which have hung out there for months waiting for me to get around to them. I haven’t even finished lbmisscharlie’s cisswapped WWII-era lesbian Steve/Bucky series, which is borderline criminal. 

Likewise, the idea of walking into a library and picking up a published novel at random is just… kind of unthinkable to me at this point, since (a) my job, commute, workouts, and my own writing take up so much of my time, and (b) I’m not a fast reader to begin with, and (c) my physical to-be-read shelf of books that I own and I am wildly excited to read is currently at 202 volumes, whereas my Powell’s wishlist of books I want to own and am wildly excited to read contains another 177. Those books are either things that were personally recommended to me by book-blogging buddies/Tumblr mutuals who know my taste, or by Gins, or by other friends/lovers/family whose judgment I trust and who know me, or are books by authors whose other work I’ve loved, or were referenced in books I loved, or, in certain cases, are books of which I’ve read professional reviews whose description of them sounded eerily up my street. 

So I guess I’m coming from a place of being very lucky that I’ve stockpiled all this fiction that is—certainly not guaranteed to delight me, since taste is always subjective, but which is very, very unlikely to (for example) include the kind of un-artful laundry-list emotional descriptions you’re talking about. That threshold you mention is more or less built into my reading experience, via having cultivated so many thoughtful rec buddies over the years. (Also, like most privileges, the existence of that threshold has become sort of invisible to me with the passage of time.) If I encountered problems like these in a third-person novel (or a first-person novel!), there’s no way I would read around them; I’d just register a moment of disappointment, then stop reading and move on to the next in the 202-book stack. You know? Which is what I meant about my standards for third-person fiction being maybe higher than average; because my standards for all fiction are higher than average. But sometimes I forget that, and just assume that because there’s more excellent fiction in the world than I will ever be able to read, that a larger-than-realistic percentage of the world’s fiction is excellent.

That said, there really is some transcendent first-person fiction out there, which makes intentional and sublime use of the POV. So idk. I hope folks keep an open mind, I suppose.


End file.
